shall best please the lord of the manor. They cannot deceive, they will not lie." And the tree was as living to Gladstone as to Walpole, but with him it was only one of innumerable living interests.

From Walpole onwards we meet with no bookish Prime Minister till we get to Lord Grenville. He was, no doubt, a man of strong literary tastes, but does not come into competition with Mr. Gladstone as an omnivorous reader, much less with the eminence, fulness, and energy of Mr. Gladstone's public life. But a friend who used to visit him gives a picture of his old age, sitting summer and winter on the same sofa with his favourite books on the shelves just over his head; Roger Ascham among them; Milton always within reach. He, at any rate, in his sixtysixth year was clear as to the choice between literature and politics. A Minister leaves him to go to his office. to his office. "I would rather he was there than I," says Grenville. "If I was

to live my life over again," he continued with a sigh, "I should do very differently."

The next possibly bookish Prime Minister

was Canning; but, with a literary side all his life, he was only Prime Minister for a few months. Beyond Canning I hardly dare to go. Melbourne, indeed, was a great reader, and, like Mr. Gladstone, a great reader of theology; but he left behind him a library of odd volumes, which puts him out of the category of book-lovers. Sir Robert Peel, like some of the statesmen of the last century, came to the business of politics as a brilliant specimen of Oxford scholarship. Lord John Russell was perhaps more a writer than a reader of books. The only book, I think, mentioned by Lord Palmerston in his correspondence is "Coningsby." Then we come to the author of "Coningsby," "born," as he says, "in a library," more bookish perhaps than Mr. Gladstone in early, and less in later life. But all this is dangerous ground; we are passing from the land of shadows into actual life; I know not where to stop. But once when I was a child, I was taken to see Hatfield. In the library we saw a tall thin figure carrying a huge volume. The housekeeper paused with awe, saying, "That is

Lord Robert Cecil." It was a bookish figure, then outside politics, but now Prime Minister.

I turn my face briskly from the alluring

present to the prudent past. Shall we find outside the list of Prime Ministers many in the secure latitudes of the past who compete with Mr. Gladstone, as being bookish men in high Ministerial office? Clarendon is beyond my horizon. But there is, of course, Addison, who was a Secretary of State, but so indifferent a one as to fail entirely in one point of comparison. There is Bolingbroke, to whom I have already alluded, and who would require a volume to himself. There is Burke, a mighty force in politics and in letters, but never in such office as to demonstrate himself a great Minister; any more than Charles James Fox, who held office for too short a time. But Charles Fox had a real passion for literature, could talk of it the whole day and over the whole range of it. He, I think, in a real love of books approaches most nearly to Mr. Gladstone, and both had a common devotion to Homer. Homer was the author that Charles Fox most loved to read; but he

would also read all the novels that he could get hold of. In conversation he would range over almost the whole field of literature with zest and passion, and without apparently once straying into politics. A friend has recorded how in a day he would discuss Homer and Virgil, Æschylus and Euripides, Milton and Massinger, Pope and Addison, Gibbon and Blackstone, Sophocles and Shakespeare, Metastasio, Congreve and Vanbrugh, Cowper, Fielding and Burns. He almost convinces himself that Burns is a better poet than Cowper. But he concludes by saying finely enough that poetry is the great refreshment of the human mind. No one surely can deny that Fox was a man of books. But he is not a parallel for the combination which in Mr. Gladstone was unique, in that he was only a Minister for a few months; once under circumstances dubious, if not sinister, and once when he was dying. He was not then, as my predecessor was, carrying on simultaneously on parallel lines a great career as a statesman in office and a delightful life in a library. Moreover, all this, except in the

case of the history of James II. which slumbers on our shelves in majestic quarto, was without any result. Nor was there in him, as I read him, the passionate concentration and practical application of reading that we saw in Mr. Gladstone. "His favourite Sultana Queen," as with his royal ancestor, "was sauntering," and sauntering was abhorrent and impossible to Mr. Gladstone. Charles Fox, at any rate, after ruining himself at cards, could sit down and derive an instant solace from Theocritus. And indeed, as a rule, the public men of the last century seem to have been fairly well equipped in what Captain Dugald Dalgetty called "the humanities"; they would have blushed not to understand, or not to appear to understand, a Latin quotation; they could bandy and bet over them as Pulteney did with Walpole, but they do not seem to have been men of books. There are perhaps two signal exceptions, statesmen of eminence and power in the first rank, who were also men of books, and I do not feel perfectly sure even of one of these two; I mean Carteret and Chesterfield.